Today The Bottle Let Peggy Noonan Down

Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins apparently has gone so far around the bend that she ought to be passing us again any minute now. Today's delusional episode concerns the opening of the Great Manure Locker down in Dallas yesterday, and la Noonan apparently feels beset again by the current's president's education, his use of multisyllabic words, and his disinclination to give her his foot to fondle. This has set the bats aloft in her overly populated belfry again.

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In all his recent interviews Mr. Bush has been modest, humorous, proud but unassuming, and essentially philosophical: History will decide. No finger-pointing or scoring points. If he feels rancor or resentment he didn't show it. He didn't attempt to manipulate. His sheer normality seemed like a relief, an echo of an older age.

An age of innocence. An age of confidence. An age of mendacious war unpaid for.

And all this felt like an antidote to Obama-to the imperious I, to the inability to execute, to the endless interviews and the imperturbable drone, to the sense that he is trying to teach us, like an Ivy League instructor taken aback by the backwardness of his students. And there's the unconscious superiority.

Jesus, woman, he's smarter than you are. So is whatever you had for breakfast. Get over it, please.

One thing Mr. Bush didn't think he was was superior. He thought he was luckily born, quick but not deep, and he famously trusted his gut but also his heart. He always seemed moved and grateful to be in the White House. Someone who met with Mr. Obama during his first year in office, an old hand who'd worked with many presidents, came away worried and confounded. Mr. Obama, he said, was the only one who didn't seem awed by his surroundings, or by the presidency itself.

Yeah, he was a really humble fella, that old W. Entltled? Him? Nonsense. Also, too: I don't believe the Old Hand exists. Unless it's la Noonan's old hand, in which case, gahhhh!

Mr. Bush could be prickly and irritable and near the end showed arrogance, but he wasn't vain or conceited, and he still isn't. When people said recently that they were surprised he could paint, he laughed: "Some people are surprised I can even read."

Coverage of the opening of his presidential library Thursday was wall to wall on cable, and a feeling of affection for him was encouraged, or at least enabled, by the Washington press corps, which doesn't much like Mr. Obama because he's not all that likable, and remembers Mr. Bush with a kind of reluctant fondness because he was.

"Sportswriters," an old baseball owner once said, "you can buy 'em with a steak." You can buy the Washington press corps with a cheap nickname. What's your point here?

But to the point. Mr. Obama was elected because he wasn't Bush. Mr. Bush is popular now because he's not Obama. The wheel turns, doesn't it? Here's a hunch: The day of the opening of the Bush library was the day Obama fatigue became apparent as a fact of America's political life.

Even if that were true, which it's not, it's not a hunch. It's a wish, which is a dream your heart makes.

Everyone was meaner, both the pols and the press, because they were all young. Now they're in their 60s. When they went through the 9/11 section of the library, the day before the opening, some had tears in their eyes. They understood now what that day was. Young journalists: You're going to become more tolerant with time, and not only because you have more to tolerate in yourself. Because life will batter you and you'll have a surer sense of what's important and has meaning and is good.

Says the aging harpy who, only several paragraphs earlier, had called the president a snooty Ivy League elitist who thinks he's smarter than everybody. And who then goes on, demonstrating how much more tolerant she's grown with time.

President Obama was more formal than the other speakers and less confident than usual, as if he knew he was surrounded by people who have something he doesn't. "No matter how much you think you're ready to assume the office of the president, it's impossible to understand the nature of the job until it's yours." This is a way of seeming to laud others when you're lauding yourself. He veered into current policy disputes, using Mr. Bush's failed comprehensive immigration reform to buttress his own effort. That was manipulative, graceless and typical.

This is the passage in question:

Seven years ago, President Bush restarted an important conversation by speaking with the American people about our history as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. And even though comprehensive immigration reform has taken a little longer than any of us expected, I am hopeful that this year, with the help of Speaker Boehner and some of the senators and members of Congress who are here today, that we bring it home - for our families, and our economy, and our security, and for this incredible country that we love. And if we do that, it will be in large part thanks to the hard work of President George W. Bush.

Also, too:

(Applause.)

Perhaps we should re-examine our premises here. Naw.

Back to the point. What was nice was that all of them-the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons-seemed like the old days. "The way we were." They were full of endurance, stamina, effort. Also flaws, frailty, mess. But they weren't . . . creepy.

Back when the Clintons actually were in the White House, Peggy Noonan called the First Lady at the time, among other things, "a highly credentialed rube," a "person who never ponders what is right," and "a squat and grasping woman." But not creepy, not like the current First Family. I'd hate to read what she would have written had she not grown so tolerant with age.

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